Return to the Online World

Although it seems that Britain (despite not being "Best in Covid" like the Czech Republic) is out of the worst, we will have to wait a few more months for the universities to reopen. The result is distance learning, which in many respects is more demanding than full-time study. Lectures take place regularly through the Panopto platform. Regular outages, technical difficulties and connection problems are evergreen. The discussion in the classrooms, which was a necessary part of the coursework, is severely limited and the assigned problem sheets are processed by the student completely individually, with only limited opportunities to consult possible approaches to their solution with classmates. It is the absence of the academic community that is the worst of the many pitfalls this time brings about. Communication with classmates - and thus the support that the student community offers - is a thing of the past, and that is what makes university study so much more complicated.

And so for the past few weeks, I've been trying - under the banner of maintaining mental health - to turn hardships into productivity. Above all, I try to regularly play sports, spend time with my family and develop in areas that used to be foreign to me. Reading non-fiction and morning yoga, which I used to neglect so much, became a regular activity. In addition, I am much more actively involved in academic clubs. Events organized on behalf of the investment association, where I am a member of the General Committee, have become at least a consolation prize for my social life that used to be so varied.

In addition, for the past few weeks, I have been preparing for job interviews in various consulting companies operating both in the Czech Republic and abroad. Thanks to that, I got to solve interesting cases from the world of business and finance. Particularly pleasant was the finding that previously only theoretical knowledge acquired in lectures can be applied in practice - and in a way that is not only productive but also beneficial. The individual interviews - I judge from those I have completed so far - also provided interesting ideas for solving broader macro and microeconomic problems, which I previously knew only from textbooks and research papers.

And so I try to survive this difficult time, which none of us could have imagined at the beginning of last year, and hope that everything will eventually return back to normal; that I will soon meet my classmates, that I will sit at a desk inside a 13th-century building and continue to live a student life that is an integral part of studying at Cambridge University.